Browsed byTag: personal

We all know, time flies. I posted about my first year at Amazon Web Services just 12 months ago and now I’m already celebrating my second AWS-birthday.

It’s been a year of both personal and professional growth: it began in December when I became head of a project that has been helping some of our customers running their platforms at massive scale, all the way up to my promotion to Senior TAM a few months back. Needless to say, customers I’m looking after have made giant leaps too, as part of transformation processes that start from the infrastructure and can reach up to their corporate culture.

My post about “Year One” was organised by subsequent evolutional phases but this won’t really make sense from the second year onward: I’ve been involved in a bunch of projects, every one of them with its own life. Why not trying then to recap the last 12 months by picking the project (more details on it here, with a cameo appearance) that took most of my time and checking our slogan “Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History” has been truly met in it? Let’s start here.

Work Hard

This is how it begins. It might seem obvious, as no one ever will pay us to do something other than working hard, but it’s not. Working hard in AWS means taking responsibilities, being effective, facing challenges and turn every opportunity into an huge success.

“Hard” as in pushing our brains to 100%, not necessarily as in working 16 hours a day. True, we carry pagers, and might end up having late evening calls with the teams in Seattle or doing late night debugging sessions from our hotel room, but this only happens in exceptional situations.

I personally find this extremely rewarding: when you focus on a project with all your energy, then the sense of achievement when it’s done is super strong.

…check ✓

Thought I was joking? This is my hotel room that night: note the Snowball Edge.

Have Fun

“Having Fun” is something we keep reading in job offers: it’s a “new economy” concept, meant as enjoying what you do and finding personal motivation in addition to the obvious business one.

I find this kind of comes by itself: if you work effectively on something and achieve results, then customers will trust you, the relationship will become more friendly and relaxed and you will end up having a lot of fun with them, even in the day to day.

This is me looking at Chris @ PhotoBox doing some snowball-weightlifting.

Check ✓

Make History

Last one, and possibly just another consequence. Is there any other way a successful project can finish?

Sometimes we might not realise how big a given change can be. We might focus on some virtual machines becoming EC2 instances and some hard drives becoming S3 partitions, but there’s much more behind the curtains: you will see a quickly changing and moving world there.

Never underestimate the importance of small actions and small steps as they can quickly prove to be giant leaps.

(in the picture below you can see me helping with the final step of a cloud migration: loading a massive storage array on a truck after datacenter decommissioning and shutdown) …check ✓

I might have a future in this area.

So What?

Two years in, and for me it still feels like it’s Day One. Learning something new every day, consciously jumping in rabbit holes every other day just to re-emerge stronger and wiser later on. Being surrounded by the smartest people on earth makes you feel extremely small sometimes, but also guarantees you endless opportunities for growth.

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It was largely unexpected, but yesterday’s post had an enormous success. Okay, nothing compared to The Blonde Salad‘s posts, but I wasn’t expecting at all to get 500 visits in a couple of hours on a blog that I was considering as dead & forgotten.

This means it’s time to focus on improving your experience on this website. The weather in Ireland, where I currently am, is really helping me focus on my blog:

What I’ve done so far, in detail:

HTTPS: I finally completed the SSL integration. All static links have been modified to use HTTPS, and any HTTP URL is now redirecting to its SSL version.

Categories & Tags: I wasn’t using categories and relied on tags to categorize my posts. After a few years the tag cloud had become a real mess, so I spent a few hours in cleaning it up and reducing the number of tags per article. From now on, every post won’t have more than 5 tags and will belong to 2 categories: the real category, and a second one (English, Italian) based on its language.

Caching: WordPress wasn’t performing at its best, so I tuned W3 Total Cache and switched to Memcache as its backend. It’s much better now.

Permalinks: Sounds like my permalinks are not so permanent. I’ve modified some titles and URLs, so you should expect to incur in 404 errors for the next few days if you’re getting here via Google or old links.

MySQL: Yes, believe it or not, I was still using MySQL 5.5. Switched to MariaDB 10.1, and I’m in the process of tuning it: you should expect some brief downtimes in the next few hours, while I restart services.

That’s it, for now at least.

Stay tuned!

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Yes, I’m back: this blog has been abandoned for like three years now, and I feel it’s time to bring it back to life. There is no particular reason behind this choice: I just need a virtual place where I can express my ideas and aggregate content I’ve always been disseminating over the internet for free (comments, forum posts, and so on).

New life means new theme (still in its basic version) and new language: some of my old posts are being read trough Google Translator, and as in the last few years my main language (mainly due to my job(s) and relationships) has been english, I have no reason at all to keep posting in italian. It’s just going to restrict my audience.

This time I won’t do what I did in all the previous “renovations”: I won’t destroy the old posts. The first one dates back to 2009 and I think they are a pretty important piece of history for them to disappear from the internet. I’m recovering the backups of the old versions of this blog in order to merge them with this one.

So, what has changed in those three years?

First, and maybe most important choice to date, I decided to put on hold (and then completely abandon) my studies at the University (Politecnico di Milano). This choice has been strongly dictated by the context (I was attending in Italy): although I perfectly understand the importance of learning the basis and developing a method for “doing things”, I felt what I was studying was too far behind reality. Spending years and thousands of euros to end up working as an underpaid intern in some big company was definitely not what I was expecting from my life.

The networking manual we were using (please mind it was 2013 and it was still being printed and was largely adopted) at a certain point stated that Ethernet was being superseded by FastEthernet, and that some big ISPs were deploying experimental long haul GigabitEthernet links. This was way too much (for non technical people reading this post: in 2013 we were already in the Terabit/s era, with multiple 100GigabitEthernet -100 times GbE- being used in long haul transits): reading this sentence, and then seeing that people that was able to get the best marks at the exam while thinking that GbE was the future (and not the past), helped me realize how detached from reality we were.

I decided to stop wasting time and joined CloudAcademy, a company that is trying to explain and show people how to take advantage of cloud services, as the Training Paths Supervisor. Feeling I had to head back to the battlefield, I decided in a few months to move to Enter, an italian ISP/CSP which at the time (late 2013) was working on the launch of a new multi-region OpenStack-based IaaS service, Enter Cloud Suite.

In Enter I have been employed first as a Cloud Architect and then as the Head of Cloud Architecture, with ECS as the main focus: I spent 2 years and a half designing and implementing hosting infrastructures for large scale news and e-commerce websites and designing, implementing and sometimes managing the OpenStack infrastructure behind Enter Cloud Suite. I was focused on the networking stack (both physical and overlay), and this gave me the opportunity to meet some very interesting realities like Cumulus Networks and Mellanox.

Then, in the first months of 2016, Amazon Web Services called: they offered me a position as a Technical Account Manager in London and I decided to accept it and move from Milan: everything happened so quickly I still have to realize what this means.

It’s very hard to explain what does it feel like being part of such a fast growing company, the one that has been the reference for your entire working life. “Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.” is our slogan, and what it is all about: I’m sitting in the buildings where history is being written, day by day.

That’s it. This is the story of how I ended up writing this post, while laying on the bed in my apartment in Canary Wharf.